Comment by jhgg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhgg | Hacker News Reader

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Huge apologies on this one. Most of your tickets were still in the queue - and no one has gotten to them yet. Some other tickets were closed in error because it looked like the issue was resolved - as your original ticket had mentioned there was an unban.

As for the initial unban, a bug had caused the "successful appeal" macro to apply - but it did not actually unban your account. Hence the confusion.

We are definitely working on improving this and the experience - and I'd like to apologize for the quite honestly shitty experience you had. 2020 has been a wild year for us, and we are still playing catch up operationally on some things - with the rapid surge of usage on the platform.

Unfortunately the people handling these appeals don't have all the information necessary to explain exactly why you were banned - and as a general policy we try to keep those exact details under wraps to thwart attempts from people to try and reverse engineer / circumvent our anti spam. (Of which there are many, so... so many people trying to do this.)

We are working hard on improving our process around this - but it's a rather gargantuan effort. From both the improvement of automation and tooling, and also staffing in general. But we are actively working on it - and a lot of my day job is to make sure we are handling these kinds of cases in a timely manner and also making sure nothing slips through the cracks due to a bug like your tickets have.

Why ban people for using Ripcord? It’s a lightweight discord client. That seems like a tactical mistake. It’s in your interest to let users use popular third party clients that clearly aren’t malicious. Discord doesn’t make money on ads (at least, not in the server) so this also doesn’t warrant a ban.

If I were you, I would be seriously concerned by the fact that they were banned at all. They handled this thing all wrong — they should have been making noise like “Discord bans me for using popular third party client”.

Notice that this story was flagged. But if they had done it that way, it would be news. And discord would look seriously bad.

Please, consider spending an hour investigating whether (a) they were banned solely for using ripcord, and (b) are we communicating to our users that they will be banned for using ripcord?

I don’t understand why nobody seems to have noticed or cared about this angle. This is really not a great look for discord, and it’s the only piece of news that has ever made me reconsider whether it was a good idea to base our 1,000 user ML discord on your platform.

Because I could imagine myself getting banned for this. And if I get banned, as the server owner, I feel queasy not knowing whether that might destroy my server and undo a year of work.

All that said, I wouldn’t be surprised to know that OP was in fact doing something more, not merely “using ripcord”, and that you can’t discuss it publicly. But, if it’s true, I urge you, regardless of your position at the company, to nip this PR disaster before it has a chance to happen. Because literally no one will be sympathetic to any of your justifications for a ripcord ban. They have users’ interests at heart, and they let people on bad laptops use discord. Banning them for normal usage is a huge mistake — it makes no sense that you’d have to “protect” discord via a ban.

We are not banning people for using Ripcord. We are banning people for using our API in ways that our official client doesn't. This is paramount to our spam detection strategy, which is detecting quirks in requests that try and emulate our official client, in order to send spam. There is a very thin line between "scripts meant to try and emulate our client to send spam in an automated fashion" and "third party client" both try and emulate our client, but perhaps for different intent. However, our systems currently treat these as equals. It is for this reason that we have maintained that 3rd party clients are against our ToS - and most warn you before you use them. Given the vanishingly small user-base of 3rd party clients relative to the tremendous amount of spam-bots that constantly are attacking our platform, it's an unfortunate reality that this is bound to happen.

If you are a real human, and not a spam bot, our general policy is to unban and tell you "hey don't do that again." Which is the outcome that should have (and eventually did) happened here.

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